Exhibition Guide

Visual Description

[Narrator] “Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama” is a vertical oil painting on linen featuring a portrait of the American attorney and author who served as first lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017.  

[Amy Sherald] The painting you’re standing in front of is 72 inches by 60 inches. There’s a figure in the center. The figure is Michelle Obama. She’s seated on a stool that you cannot see, and she has on a white cotton dress that falls over her lap onto the floor in front of her. The dress is lightly shadowed.  

[Narrator] Obama’s white gown takes up most of the bottom half of the painting. It is decorated with colorful geometric patterns. 

[Amy Sherald] The shapes on the dress are geometrical, circular and rectangular with triangles. The colors of the dress include black, white, a pink that feels like the bottom of a baby’s foot, a yellow that might remind you of how the sun feels on a sunny day, a very light gray that might feel like a misty rain and a bright orangey red that might feel hot to touch. Her skin is painted gray. I mix this gray color using black and yellow, so that the tones of the skin are warm, her hair is hitting her shoulders and it has soft curls at the end. She’s sitting with her arm crossed over the top of her lap and with one hand under her chin touching her arm. The weight of her face is on the back of her hand and she’s looking at you, the viewer. She has on a pair of diamond earrings and she has her wedding band on her hand. The background is a soft blue. I worked on this color a long time to make sure that it captured the sense of airiness surrounding her. I wanted the figure to feel as if it was monumental and that there was space in front and behind her.

 

Artwork Label

In 2017, Sherald was invited to create the official portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama. Although this was her first commission, she approached it as she had all her previous works: she focused on the essence of her subject. As Sherald has stated, “I wanted to produce something that…alluded to the nuances of who [Obama] really is versus who she has to be.” When choosing Obama’s clothing for the portrait, Sherald was drawn to a dress by MILLY designer Michelle Smith for its contemporary quality and geometric print that reminded her of Gee’s Bend quilts from Alabama as well as works by abstract painter Piet Mondrian. The artist then photographed Obama in natural light, capturing her in an open and unguarded pose.

The painting breaks significantly with the conventions of official portraiture, presenting Obama as gracious and comfortable, but also inward-looking and self-contained. The latter is especially notable given that Obama’s movements, statements, and appearance were and still are subject to endless public scrutiny. In Sherald’s painting, Obama is both a Black woman from the South Side of Chicago and an ultimate African American first: a Black First Lady who is the descendant of enslaved Africans. As a result, while no less poised or formal, Sherald’s powerful portrayal shares more with her paintings of everyday Black people than with portraits of first ladies who preceded or have followed Obama.